Monday, August 13, 2018

Sipike Lee's BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee’sBlacKkKlansman was released on the first anniversary of Charlottesville. Yet it’s strangely equivocal and equanimous at first. The film is rife with all manner of iconography and film reference. A scene in which Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the black cop on whose memoir the movie is based, goes dancing with Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), the president of the Black Student Union at Colorado College, who sports an Angela Davis style Afro sends up Don Cornelius’ Soul Train. Black genre films of the 70’s like Superfly and Shaft are cited along with D.W. Griffith’s TheBirth of a Nation (projected on the face of Alec Baldwin the resident Trump parodist on Saturday Night Live) and Gone With the Wind. The Birth of a Nation itself has recently been the subject of “remake” by Nate Parker. Of course the epitome of equivocation is the paralleling of the cries of “white power” and “black power” by the film’s two contingencies: the Klan addressed by David Duke (Topher Grace) whose “American first” and “make America great” type comments create cackles of recognition in the audience and the black student group which is being addressed by Stokely Carmichael aka Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). At the end Patrice says “my conscience wont let me sleep with the enemy” to which Ron replies “I’m the black man who saved your life.” But the film is also a parody of equivocation. Donald Trump’s famous comment about the tragic protests in which he gave moral equivalence to White Supremacists, haunts the narrative.Stereotypes are parodied and juxtaposed and the paralleling itself becomes the subject of parody. The film is full of clever little turns of racist logic. Ron’s sidekick Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) a Jewish undercover cop undercuts one of the Klansmen’s arguments for holocaust denial by pointing out how effective the holocaust was in getting rid of Jews. The director’s choreography of ideas, the dance of his plot lines, is clever and entertaining right up until its stunning ending when the action crashes head-on with the sad reality and violence of the raw Charlottesville footage. The rotary phone has a cameo in BlacKkKlansman.It’s the anachronistic vehicle by which Ron Stallworth speaks to David Duke. You might simply write it off as a prop in a period piece, but there’s something, not hopeful, but wistful about it. The anachronism is the elephant in the room, since the charade on which the movie is premised, the delusive connection or lack thereof between two human beings is ultimately name of the game.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.